An intentional missed call is a widely used method in developing countries, particularly South Asia, the Philippines and large parts of Africa, to save money or mobile minutes. It is essentially the poor man's text message, a free way to nudge another person. There is even an app available to complete a miss call with one touch.

A report suggests, in any hour, that missed calls can constitute upto 70% of the total network traffic for Grameenphone, Bangladesh's largest telephone network. Cellphone operators in Bangladesh have reduced call rates upto 90% in the past decade to get more customers talking and earn profits by economies of scale. But the price of mobile internet has not come down.

In 2006 when Bangladesh was connected to the SEA-ME-WE-4 cable the price of Bandwidth was exorbitant – per Mbit/s bandwidth was BDT 80,000 (approximately USD 1,125). Internet was not available to masses then, especially to the youth. In 2008 the government reduced the price to BDT 27000. After that the Awami League government came to power with its “Digital Bangladesh” slogan. They started reducing the cost of bandwidth in several steps to make it available to the grassroots population. In 2009 per Mbit/s was reduced to BDT 18,000 (approximately USD 250) and in 2012 it was further cut down to BDT 8000 (USD 100). The regulatory body BTRC has plans to bring down the price of 1 Mbit/s to BDT 5000 (USD 60) soon.

They ask whether the consumers are getting the benefit of these price cuts:

If you can remember, GrameenPhone introduced their EDGE package in 2006 and the price remained constant Their 1GB volume shared internet package is still BDT 350. The government has reduced price twice in the meantime but their price has not changed a bit. The same complain applies for Banglalink, Rabi, Airtel and other operators. [..] Airtel's per 10MB internet volume package is BDT 10 in Bangladesh. But the same company offers 125 MB in India at INR 10 (BDT 15). [..] In this way the price cuts by the government had no effect on the consumers who are getting overcharged compared to neighboring countries.

A student of Dhaka University before a huge wall painting of Communism talks over mobile phone. Image by Firoz Ahmed. Copyright Demotix (15/5/2012)

We will keep every mobile network busy at a specific time and date, without spending a penny. And the easiest way is to use “miss call”. If we start to send miss call to our contacts in a specific time, then the BTS of the mobile operators will be busy. As we are not paying anything, we have nothing to lose. The company will lose as we are using their network without any revenue. If a lot of people can do it at once then the impact will be felt by the company.

The Facebook event has gone viral and more than 140,000 people have already been invited and approximately 15000 people said yes. According to an update by Duurjodhon:

The idea of doing harm without violence is novel, even if these kinds of weird ideas cause laughter.

Using internet in the cellphone is a luxury or a necessity that is much debatable. If the protesters could avoid this miss call game and instead threatened to stop the use of mobile internet and made it a bigger campaign then they could be more successful.

We have a consumer rights organization, they could compare the operating costs of the mobile internet and the price for the end consumers and take legal measures against the operators if necessary. They could even produce evidences of malpractices to the government.